December 2025

I sleep in a city where every train arrives
exactly on time—
except the one I'm on,
which stops between stations,
fluorescent lights stuttering
like my mother's voice on a long-distance call.

Moshi moshi?
Sometimes I forget which language
I was dreaming in.

---

At the konbini at 3am,
a girl counts coins with chipped nail polish.
I buy milk I won't drink
just to hear her say arigatou gozaimasu—
that soft formal distance
more intimate than touching.

Outside, the vending machines hum
their electric lullabies.
I think: this is also a kind of belonging.

---

You asked me once what home sounds like.
I said: the pause between words
when you can't find the right one
in any language you know.

The way natsukashii means nostalgic
but carries the weight of seasons
and childhood and lost things—
how English makes me explain
what Japanese lets me feel.

Home is the translation I never finish.

---

In London, they ask where I'm really from.
In Tokyo, they compliment my Japanese
like a visitor who studied hard.

I've learned to live
in the margins of dictionaries,
the footnotes explaining idioms
that lose their warmth
in transfer.

But here's what no one tells you:
sometimes the in-between
is its own country.
Population: one.
Language: yours alone.

---

This morning I watched a woman on the platform
adjust her child's backpack,
smooth his hair,
and the tenderness was so ordinary
it hurt.

I wanted to write it down
but couldn't choose the language—
couldn't decide which words
would hold the weight of it:
the small corrections we make
to keep each other safe
in a world of precise departures.

So I stood there, silent,
in the space between saying and seeing,
which is maybe where all poems begin.

#poetry #identity #language #belonging

The rain in Shinjuku falls
in a language I half-remember—
ame, rain, neither word quite right
for the sound it makes
against the konbini awning.

I am always translating myself
into something easier to carry.
A name that fits in two syllables.
A smile that means the same thing
in every airport.

My mother's voice on the phone
is a country I left behind.
My father's silence
is the one I'm trying to reach.

---

At 3 AM the city hums
with the loneliness of vending machines,
their blue light spilling onto wet asphalt
like an apology no one asked for.

I buy a coffee I won't drink.
The machine thanks me in Japanese.
I say you're welcome in English
to no one.

This is how I love—
in the wrong language,
at the wrong time,
to people who aren't listening.

---

Sometimes I dream in a tongue
that belongs to neither country,
wake up with words dissolving
on my lips like snow.

I am fluent in leaving.
I am fluent in the space between
sayonara and goodbye,
that breath where neither means
I'll see you again.

My body is a suitcase
I keep packing and unpacking.
My heart, a passport
with too many stamps
and nowhere left to go.

But tonight, the rain
doesn't ask which language I speak.
It falls the same on everyone—
on the salarymen rushing home,
on the stray cats under parked cars,
on me, standing at the crosswalk,
waiting for the light to change.

#poetry #identity #bilingual #displacement

I wake at 3am to the hum of the refrigerator,
a sound I know in two languages—
reizouko and fridge,
both words failing to capture the loneliness
of a kitchen lit only by its own cold light.

My grandmother used to say
the dead visit us in our dreams,
but I think they live in objects:
the teacup with the chipped rim,
the scarf that still smells faintly of her perfume,
the way I fold my clothes
exactly as she taught me,
precise corners, edges aligned.

***

In the train window, my reflection
floats over the city lights—
neither inside nor outside,
a ghost commuting between worlds.

The woman next to me is reading a book
in a language I recognize but cannot speak.
We are all strangers here,
shoulder to shoulder,
pretending we are alone.

I think of my mother's voice on the phone,
asking when I'll come home,
but home is a word with too many addresses:
the apartment where I sleep,
the house where I grew up,
the city I left,
the city I'm learning to love
in small, reluctant increments.

***

Tonight I will translate someone else's love poem,
searching for the English equivalent of natsukashii—
that ache for something lost that was never quite yours.

The word doesn't exist.
I will write "nostalgia" and know I have failed,
but this is the work:
to carry what cannot be carried,
to say what cannot be said,
to live in the space between
and call it something like home.

Outside, it's starting to rain.
I know this sound too,
ame falling on rooftops,
the same water, different names,
washing everything clean
and leaving it just as it was.

#poetry #identity #bilingual #displacement #belonging

under the fluorescent hum of 7-Eleven at 3am
I buy an onigiri and wonder
if loneliness tastes the same
in every language

the clerk says irasshaimase
without looking up
and I think about all the words
we've learned to say
to no one in particular

*

my mother texts me in Japanese
I reply in English
we meet somewhere in the middle
where meaning blurs
like neon in rain

she asks if I'm eating well
I say yes
which is true
but not the whole truth

the whole truth is
I've been living on convenience store meals
and the memory of her miso soup
which I can't replicate
no matter how many times
I try

*

on the Yamanote line
a man falls asleep
on my shoulder

his breath is soft
his trust complete

for seven stops
we are intimate strangers
then he wakes at Shibuya
mutters sumimasen
and disappears
into the crowd

I carry the weight
of his dreaming head
for the rest of the day

*

my friend says
you must feel so free
living between worlds

I don't tell her
that some nights
I feel like I'm falling
through the gap

that freedom and exile
are separated only
by who's telling the story

that home is not a place
but a question
I'm still learning
how to ask

*

tonight I'll walk
through Shimokitazawa
past the used bookstores
and record shops
where other displaced people
search for themselves
in other people's words

maybe I'll find a collection
by Akhmatova or Celan
poets who knew
what it means
to lose your language
and still have so much
to say

or maybe I'll just buy
another onigiri
and call it dinner

either way
I'll be speaking
in my own accent
a hybrid thing
that belongs nowhere
and everywhere
at once

#poetry #identity #Tokyo #displacement

in the airport lounge at 3am
I watch a man sleep with his head on his carry-on,
mouth open, trusting strangers
not to steal his dreams.

yasashii, I think—
but there's no English word that sits right,
no synonym soft enough
to hold what I mean.

I've been carrying dictionaries my whole life,
switching tongues mid-sentence,
apologizing in the wrong language,
feeling foreign in both.

My mother says okaeri
but I'm never sure where I've returned from.
My father texts in English
with Japanese punctuation。

---

the train window holds two cities—
one rushing past in neon,
one reflected, ghostly, where I sit
watching myself disappear.

I used to think belonging meant
choosing one reflection over the other.
Now I think it means learning
to live between the glass,

half-visible,
half-passenger,
fluent in neither language
but native to the hyphen.

At Shibuya crossing I count
a thousand people crossing
a thousand other people
and no one colliding.

We've learned the choreography
of moving through each other
like water, like breath—
intimate strangers

who will never speak,
never touch,
but for one moment
we are the same body.

I think of the word ma—
the pause between heartbeats,
the space that makes the music.

Maybe home is not a place
but the gap between places,
the silence between languages
where I am finally fluent.

---

tonight in my studio apartment
where the walls are thin enough
to hear my neighbor's television dreams,
I write a poem in English,

translate it into Japanese,
then back again—
and what returns
is almost the same,

almost mine,
almost what I meant to say
before language
made its choices for me.

The difference between the two
is where I live—
in the almost,
in the between.

#poetry #identity #bilingual #belonging